


nothing stranger than man

by m_peridot



Category: Naruto
Genre: But not the canon way, Child Neglect, Depression, Gen, Loyalty, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Patriotism, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Uchiha Massacre, and its aftermath, and the breakdown of both, no beta we die like the ANBU supporting cast, nukenin!Sasuke
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:34:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28924422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_peridot/pseuds/m_peridot
Summary: Antigone calls upon her gods to justify her and her mourning. Antigone calls upon the gods and thus condemns the city, condemns Creon, condemns herself.There are no gods that the shinobi pray to; there is only the Shinigami, and shinobi fear - they do not worship. Still, Sasuke mourns a man not dead and thus sets himself apart from his Village, his team, his Hokage. In doing so he severs the threads that seek to bind his loyalty, and returns to blood and kin.What is a clan reduced to one?
Kudos: 4





	1. bacchanalia, or terror in lunacy

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter is more of a prelude than anything else. 
> 
> I wanted to write this fic because I wanted the Village's neglect to have consequences. We consistently see characters in "chosen one" type stories that suffer abuse or neglect and really don't seem affected by it. Harry Potter is a famous one, and so is Naruto. But at least with Uzumaki Naruto, he is given a reason to stay. He has his precious people, however few they are in number.
> 
> Canon had this right at least: Sasuke has no ties to the Village, to Konoha. 
> 
> Who was he raised by? It is implied that he was left to fend for himself, like Naruto. Perhaps politically there is some sense to it. But ethically? It's not like Sasuke is a genin (unlike Hatake Kakashi, who is /also/ implied to have basically raised himself from age six). 
> 
> I guess I just wanted a fic that had Sasuke leave, but for the right (however subjective that is) reasons. 
> 
> So I will put the warning here: This fic deals with issues of mental health, issues of memory and perfect recall, issues of child neglect, issues of PTSD and a militaristic society that does not care. This fic assumes a world in which the Uchiha Massacre was a viable option for Konoha, a world that sees death as a transaction, as a business. 
> 
> This fic is not grimdark, but it does assume canon not as it was meant to be, but with all the repercussions of its own events.

_Why?_

The sky darkens to dripping crimson as he stumbles upon a snag in reality — looks up and there is nothing but delusion. Stumbling steps cannot be heard underwater, so only the impact remains to remind him that he is still moving, still reaching, even through the sluggish flow of blood. Every footfall seems to him of utmost significance, and so the impact reverberates through his body, filling up all thought and flattening everything else to fluttering paper talismans. The red symbols remind him, were supposed to remind him. But they are strung along the edge of his consciousness, and it is so easy to instead focus on the moments of his progression. 

His breath stutters as he counts the steps; his nails cut crescents for every addition. 

Physicality is easier to dwell on. _This is real._ _I am here._

Physicality is all he ever had, and at least his heartbeat will never lie. 

He does not draw his eyes back to the sky, but its presence oppresses him, driving him, his eyes, closer and closer to his feet, to his own movements, and he is bent in double in order to escape its lies. 

_To test my potential._

And the talismans turn and still accusingly, the red flashing. They warn: _You have failed to interpret the signs. Do not forget that we warned you then. We are warning you now. And we will continue to warn you like Cassandra on the streets of Troy._

His feet quicken, or maybe the blood quickens, and suddenly his eyes are being carried away from that oppressive gaze and instead are blinded by black feathers and black smoke. 

_Ah, but you have never had the courage to face the gods_ , the talismans taunt. _You run from that night and pretend that you still have purpose — though it is only prophecy that drives you, your kinslayer’s words._

And his feet lead him down, and the rocks split open to reveal Hades.

This is insanity—they are dining in the Underworld with three judges proclaiming his sentence. This is a dance—intensity in the red wine, sharp blades cutting cutting _cutting_ —they are all acolytes, all obsessed with the same god-once-human, host of these festivities, the man with eyes that know the mortal mind and delight in the contortions, all without laying a finger inside the skull. It is subtle, an insidious pleasure-pain, and he has never felt so alive but at that terror.

( _it is so vivid that life begins to fade; there is an horrifying emptiness and he does not know anymore if it is from the too-still Compound or the loss of that fanaticism—no, he does not_ want _to know_ )

His eyes bleed. 

( _it is a curse, the act that imprisons the light and lets it fester_ )

( _still, he forgets too many important facts of that night, but it does not matter—there is no forgiveness, there is no comprehension, there_ cannot be—)

This is insanity—listen to the drums as they control the ebb and flow of movement, stamp your feet and feel the collision, the sensitivity to touch and sight and hearing—this is _life_ , this is _death,_ this is neither and a delusion that chisels reality, the cracks spread—taste wine at the seams where you finally _see—_


	2. certain death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasuke after the Attack, and how he continues existence

“I knew I must die, even without your decree:   
I am only mortal. And if I must die   
now, before it is my time to die,   
surely this is no hardship: can anyone   
living, as I live, with evil all about me,   
think Death less than a friend?”

_ — Antigone to Creon as he confronts her defiance of his law — _

It is at the age of eight and six months that Uchiha Sasuke steps into the centermost house in the Compound and understands that, however much he cleans, the bloodstains will live with him. He enters the house as the last living Uchiha in Konoha, the Head of a decimated clan, and realizes bitterly that he does not want this position (that he, no matter his desire for attention, would have been content,  _ would have been proud _ , to see his brother leading the clan, and isn’t that  _ ironic _ ).

It is at the age of eight and six months that Uchiha Sasuke, having hysterically turned away any and all offers of guardianship, first comprehends the sheer enormity of having to take care of oneself. (Later, when he is somewhere closer to adult than child or shinobi, he will wonder at the decisions that led to his isolation in the place of his family's slaughter. Perhaps the Hokage had been waiting for him to surrender so that Konoha itself could rescue and mold him into theirs. But perhaps the reasons didn’t matter, and perhaps the time to piece together something of a separate identity had been a blessing as well as a curse.) 

When he first steps foot back into his house, he gets to the center of the living room before panic hits him twice. 

As the dark spots fade from his vision, he stumbles outside and dry heaves, glad for once that he'd had no stomach for hospital food. The grounds of the Uchiha are desolate and suffocating, and he cannot help but see corpses in the shadows of houses.

(This is desecrated ground, and the Uchiha have ever been an old clan, one that still clung to some of the old ways, and they would have cleansed it with fire. Sasuke wonders if those who'd dragged the bodies away had trembling hands, had ash clinging to their form. He wonders if anyone gave his kin a proper burial — but he knows that they didn't, because kin has always buried kin, and the Uchiha have always taken care of their own. Their fires would release their souls across that river, and leave no reminders for them to lose their way back.)

That day, he goes hungry. 

Until the sun sets, Sasuke cannot bring himself to return to the front door, to the silence. Panic hits him one last time as twilight comes — the light falls in the same shadows and illuminates doorways as it did that day two months ago, and he finds himself keening, suddenly upright and poised to run. When his breath settles, he blinks, only to find himself in the living room again. This time he doesn't leave.

The next day, he gets up and braves his parents’ room. He walks like a thief, quiet and barely trembling, as if he doesn’t belong, and he spends fifteen minutes trying not to shake before snatching his mother’s money bag off of the place she always put it before sprinting to the courtyard, where he tries to gouge out his empty stomach and splatter it all over the cracked wall. 

Perhaps it is a good thing that he had nothing to eat the other day. 

He finally gathers himself and looks inside and determines that there is enough for groceries. Even for more than that but he cannot focus on anything more than this task. He knows what to buy (and carefully does not think  _ how _ he knows what to buy) and while he could eat at a restaurant, he doesn’t think he can sit down, in front of people, and not feel like he’s falling. 

At least groceries are accompanied by only a few pitying looks, ones he can avoid, or at the very least ignore. Sitting at a restaurant would leave him wide open to stares and he cannot bear it as he is now. 

He weaves around the crowd, and perhaps it is because it is early in the morning (and because most children are at the Academy or civilian school and half the adults are at work) that he finds Konoha less oppressive than when he was at the hospital. 

He finds himself wavering just a bit, every now and then, the lack of sleep and food dizzying him. But he is not tired — weary, yes, but his eyes do not threaten to close and neither does his body wish to lie down. 

The groceries are oddly heavy today. 

Somehow, he is more tired than he’d felt the whole way home and he collapses in the entryway for a few minutes before dragging himself to the door and sliding it shut. It is winter now, and while Konoha almost never has snow, the biting cold all too often finds its way into open places — doors, windows, cracked walls. It is winter now, and Sasuke realizes that he must light the irori to warm the room. 

(It is a wonder that he did not freeze the other day — in this kind of weather, one could become dangerously cold in unnoticeable increments.)

There are no matches, or rather, none that he can find — the Uchiha Clan, while able to copy jutsu and movement, had always preferred their traditional fire jutsu, and even their civilians were able to form fire with their lips. But Sasuke’s control is still that of a young child, and while he can breathe fire, it blooms in the air and expands into something uncontrollable. It is why all children begin their practice before the lake; it is why, when Itachi had created a smaller, controlled orb the first time he had opened his mouth to create heat and light, he had been praised as a genius. 

Sasuke knows this and will not risk burning down the house on a hope that perhaps his concentration will be  _ enough _ . So he goes to the lake, and he holds a branch and clumsily, with the branch held between his pressed forearms, forms the signs —  _ snake, ram, monkey, boar, horse, tiger _ . 

Fire roars across the lake and catches on the edge of the branch, igniting it and splashing heat over his hands and his eyes. 

And while he wants to stumble, he walks back carefully, steadily, the flame coaxed and guarded, until he pushes the branch into the irori in the middle of the room and finally collapses, feeling warm for the first time that day. 

(He doesn’t cook that day, preferring to eat the already prepared meal he’d bought at the store — he doesn’t cook the day after that either, because he realizes that he can’t breathe when he goes to the kitchen and sees that nothing has changed. He doesn’t set foot into the kitchen until a full month and a half has passed.)

(He can’t cook anyway.)

In those first two months after he is released front the hospital, Uchiha Sasuke learns to take on all the tasks of managing the household filled with ghosts. He learns that using the stove requires attention that he does not have, that sometimes the bars of the Tsukiyomi slam down against his consciousness and forces him to relive things he did not see. He learns that using the stove requires steadiness as he emerges from staring blankly at the wall, as his lungs fill with smoke. He learns that cooking is something that he cannot do the way he is now.

He learns also that washing clothes requires organization, that if he throws everything into the wash the blue bleeds into white and tan and ruins it. (He finds more clothes his size and carefully does not think where they come from.) He learns that he does not know how to manage money — that he is not prepared to deal with his Clan’s finances (that the bank official in charge of the Uchiha wouldn’t trust him anyway), nor how opportunistic parasites might take advantage of his ignorance, of the only descendent of the Uchiha. (He is paranoid of every glance, every smile, every show of emotion—Sasuke is constantly angry, and it is draining.)

But still, he learns, because while he will never be a genius ( _ no matter how his status as the last of his clan titles him so _ ), he is desperate, and desperate men oft find themselves more capable than once believed. 

He learns which stores sell the cheapest foods, then remembers ( _ his mother’s words _ ) that he needs to have a balanced diet, and while ramen is cheap, he’ll regret it if he eats it everyday. (He doesn’t even like the noodles.) So he eats vegetables with dull eyes, not in the empty dining room, but on his bed trying to forget the soft insistence to  _ finish the meal and grow strong _ —

He is glad that he doesn’t like sweets, that he does not have to limit himself on the things he does like—tomatoes and training. (He forgets that he used to like more than this, that he used to have a myriad of interests back when life was more vivid than the dull grey seeping through the bloodstained walls.) His room is spartan—when he returned, he cleared everything out, all the toys, the pictures, the drawings; when he returned, he had been angry (he was still angry) and what good were remembrances of a past which seemed a dream in a world that had started anew that terrible night?

But slowly he manages to function. 

Slowly his panic fades into the softness of dreams and limits itself to warning him that nothing is safe instead of shutting him down. It is good; it must be good, because if he cannot breathe in the field of battle he will be killed. Perhaps worse — they may not ever let him out of the Village and it has become so suffocating that he suffers through the Academy on the hopes that once he is older he may leave for months on end. 

For two months (for perhaps that year, or four years) he refuses to think. There is no loneliness if he can keep his mind blank. There is no loneliness if he focuses on small irritations, if he lets only anger out in small bursts. There is no panic if he carefully refuses to think, if he shuts the part of his brain down that screams that he has been betrayed and left to rot in the forests of Hi no Kuni. 

His mind blanks (except for when it doesn’t) and he subsists on daily irritations.


End file.
